jabber.fsinf.at Jabber for everyone!

Since Facebook now offers a normal XMPP server, we are dropping the facebook transport, which didn't work very well anyway. If you want to chat on Facebook via XMPP, please see this guide.

Our MSN-transport was causing ultra-excessive traffic for some time, and things have gotten so far out of hand, that we had to temporarily deactivate it. The transport will remain down for at least a week, when we have time to investigate the matter further.

We had an unexpected downtime a few days ago because ejabberd crashed. Since the restart worked right away and I was actually logged into the machine at the time of the crash, the downtime lasted only a few seconds.

Also, today at midnight we will upgrade to ejabberd-2.1.2. As always, the packages are already available in our Apt repositories. As usual, this will cause a downtime of a minute or so.

On a little sidenote, I discovered that Spectrum also supports the Yahoo protocoll... so we now have a Yahoo transport!

We had a very long unexpected downtime today due to both our DNS servers crashing. The servers started working again at about 4:30pm CET, when exactly they went down is unclear (but before 10am). This failure made our jabber service effectively unreachable to our users. Interestingly, there never where fewer than 17 users online, those users must have had our IP in their hosts file. We used the opportunity to switch from our flaky DNS servers to the ones provided by Nessus which already has been our registrar so far.

With the recent release of ejabberd-2.1.1 we already updated our apt repositories. We will upgrade the installation at December, the 25th, at midnight, so expect a short downtime then.

Update: Everything went very smoothly. Total downtime was less than a minute.

As we recently learned, the handling of when a user last logged in is somewhat terrible when you use ODBC (PostgreSQL or MySQL). I did report the issue (EJAB-1031) even before then, but not realizing the problem could affect ejabberdctl to. Since the correct information is actually inserted into the database, I have written a script to fill in for that functionality. So from January the 1st, Accounts which haven't been used for a year, will be deleted!

In the past 24 hours we fixed our publish/subscribe service (turns out, there is a bug in ejabberd 2.1.0, see EJAB-1115). Also, due to a missing wildcard DNS-entry, the VCARD and Publish/Subscribe service were not available for users from other jabber-servers. Both problems are fixed now, by the power of erlang/ejabberd, this was possible without any downtime for the users.

Thanks to a lovely new project called Spectrum we now offer tons of new transports: Gadu-Gadu, Myspace.im, QQ, Simple and XMPP. The AIM-Transport is now also provided by Spectrum. Spectrum is highly beta, so please test the new transports if you have an account on any of the networks. Please provide feedback as a comment here or directly add issues to the github bugtracker.

Today at arount 7:45pm CET a bug in ejabberd, a misunderstanding in how jabber-connections between servers work and a testing environment emulating the real environment to well caused the worst glitch in the entire existence of this service: Every buddy that is not on jabber.fsinf.at of every jabber.fsinf.at-user, received a fake unsubscription notification ("User X [at] jabber [dot] fsinf [dot] at has removed you from his roster") from the jabber.fsinf.at-user. This affected all users that created their account before April, 2009. Read on for more details on what happened why.

A detailed description and help for our webpresence service is now available here.